healing, change, love and life.

For ten years I tried. I tried to be a good wife, a perfect mother, and live according to what I thought was right.
I left the life I knew. I stepped outside of my comfort zone and decided to live my life, really LIVE it.
I had never loved the sweet man I was married to. We married for all the wrong reasons...he was truly an amazing man, honest, compassionate, loving...but he was not for me.

I suffered depression. I felt rage. I feared for my children. I denied my own heart. I felt no passionate love for ten years.

I've been living on my own, as has he.... sharing, loving, caring for our kiddos, together yet separately.

Life has been beautiful these last several months. Living in the moment, living for what I believe in, loving and being loved, being mindful of every moment, every choice, every action and reaction...

I don't know what the future will bring. I would not want to know....for part of the beauty of this new life is the excitement for and fear of what is to come.

New friends have come along, friends who choose to be around me for love, for passion, for a hunger for knowledge and for living, for similar tastes and like mindedness...

Yes my heart is so full I can hardly contain myself. Challenges still come, but I work my way through them with as much grace and patience as I can.

We have moved home...to my hometown. Everywhere I look, I feel so in love. Is it possible to be in love with the sky, the hills, the gurgling mountain creeks, the roads so often traveled, the familiar faces from my childhood?
As I sit on the swing in front of the elementary school that I attended, waiting for my kiddos, I feel content...I am where I belong, as are they. As I drive the old country roads I walked as a child I feel young again. Alive.
The scent of honeysuckle and briar rose take me back to when I was a tiny girl, hunting for pheasant eggs and splashing in the shallow river, belting out songs to the sky and the birds and the trees, to the amazing world that surrounded me.

I grew up on a ranch. The dirt roads and hidden creeks were mine and mine alone to explore.
I remember a couple who would come and take me swimming. I might have been seven years old. They would take me to the creek and snuggle me down with a blanket in the sunshine, then they threw off their clothes and ran, laughed, danced through the water with wild abandon. They were ALIVE.

I have gone through years of not understanding my childhood...thinking that it was wrong...not as it should have been. I recently came to realize that normal doesn't exist. Everything is what it is. Life. I blamed my mother for her failed marriages and boyfriends that breezed into our life and just as quickly blew away in a whirlwind of emotions.
That was passion. It took me thirty some years to understand it for what it was. I love my mother with all of my heart. When I thought she didn't love me, she was actually trying to feel love herself...be loved and give love and I just was. I was hers and I was constant and she loved me and should not have had to confirm this to me, but as I grew in this fucked up society my perception was off and oh so wrong. My logic was illogical irrational... :) I giggle about it now.

My childhood was bliss. I was free and loved by many. Days were spent always outdoors, sunshine burning my delicate nose, blessing me with these freckles I struggle to embrace. My hair was blonde and my skin was golden. I'm grinning in all of the photos...sheer joy on my face as we were on one adventure or another...gardening, fishing, baking, camping, canning, picking huckleberries, floating the river, boating at black canon, walking through the marijuana plants that seemed miles high above my head, climbing the hills, picnics, singing and dancing, flying kites, always with loved ones, always laughing, always feeling wrapped in the arms of a powerful love.

There seemed to be musicians always in our life. My father sang like an angel and played the guitar. I saw him a few times when I was little...never knowing him for his faults, just seeing who I dreamt him to be. Her boyfriends played this and that...some sang. They always shared that joy with me...the passion for life. I felt it.

One day she married a different kind of man. There was no more freedom. I stopped living.

I'm over it and I recognize it for what it is. I can't go back and change the past but I can change my life right now.
She married that man in the same way I married my husband. What was right, the best thing...yet it wasn't, not really.
When I met my husband my son was going through chemotherapy. I thought I had nothing to offer a child. I had no riches, no fancy house, no expensive car. I couldn't shop at Hollister and buy them all the latest technical gadgets...I was so confused. I thought life was about all of those things...
In the years of living that life I died again and again. I was sick and developed illnesses, had a nervous breakdown, lost my tan and my smile, nearly lost my mind and my life.
One morning I woke up and knew I had to leave. If I didn't leave I would die.

Long ago my mother left that man and went back to her life of adventure, of laughter, of love.
Now I've done the same.
She made me breakfast yesterday as I poured out my heart and latest woes. My little boy and I basked in her love. We walked through her simple garden and listened to her ramble about plants and weather. I felt such an overwhelming love for her.
She is me and I am her, yet we aren't.

We went to the hills last week to hunt cress...found some flourishing in a small trickling spring. She shares my love of wildcrafting, foraging, nature, and simplicity or I hers....because after all she did create me.

I'm thrilled to be alive right now. Each morning I wake with such a passion for this life. I am so blessed to be gifted with each new day. I will never go back to the death I was living. I'm alive. Oh I am so very ALIVE.

I've rented a small ten acre farm in my hometown. We will be raising goats and chickens, our two Pyrenees pups are growing fast and they will be our graceful guardians. I've been taking a sewing break, but it will come back in the winter. I'm more into herbs than ever....I "live" to grow things, to nourish, to nurture.
The garden will be beautiful this summer. I plan to surround our fire pit with friends, smiles and music. I will allow my kids to run,giggle, scream, cry, vent, be naked, pee on trees(he loves it, lol), learn from their mistakes, and simply live.
I see bits of me in them. I plan to encourage those qualities. They accept me for who I am and they only wish to see me happy.
Well kids, I am. I am so very content.

I hope that they will always remember this lesson that I have shared with them about my childhood and my mother.

On a side note.....

I'm absolutely hopelessly madly in love. I don't know that it will last forever, but it's right now and I'm going to flow with it.
He fills me up. There is an ease that I have never known. We wake wrapped around one another and overwhelmingly in love. I couldn't ask for more. All I can do is allow it to grow and give my whole heart.
I'm still struggling to accept this body of mine that has birthed five children and daily I still have to push down insecurity and fear of what will be, but I'm strong and I will persevere. Life is worth it. Love is worth it.

blessings....